Gain New Customers with Social Media

One the quickest and easiest ways to gain new customers these days is through social media.  Most social media sites are free, easy to use, and have millions users.  Sounds like a great resource to me!

So now the question is: How do I get started with my business on one or all of the social networking sites?

Start by directing new potential customers to your social media accounts (assuming, of course, you already have these accounts set up).  The best was to do this would be incentivizing the act of becoming your friend, fan, follower, or whatever.

The possibilities here are endless.  Some of my clients have offered free t-shirts for the 500th follower on Twitter or the 100th fan on Facebook.  My clients also post promotions on their social media accounts and tell followers and fans to re-tweet or share the post and one will be selected at random to win some prize (#hashtags are a good way to keep track of this on Twitter).  These prizes can be as simple as a discount or t-shirt, or you could give them an i-pod or a Wii.  (Just be sure to post the winner of these prizes to maintain the integrity of your incentives.

Another idea would be to tell a customer that just made a purchase that if they connect with you on one of your accounts, they will receive a coupon or discount to use on future purchases.  This not only expands your social media presence and influence, it increases the likelihood of creating a repeat customer.

You know how customers often give their e-mail addresses to be put on a mailing list that will send future promotions and discounts to their inboxes?  Well, using social media in this manner is fairly similar to this, but with social media, a business is better able to engage with the customer.  In using social media, customers are interacting with your brand, which is much more likely to result in a sale than that beautiful e-mail they received and then prompted deleted.